Sorcery! 1-4 - RPS 2016 Highlight

In today's entry of the "RPS 2016 Advent Calendar", Rock, Paper, Shotgun tells us why the Sorcery! series is an RPG hallmark.

I was not expecting to come away from the fourth and final part of the Sorcery! Series with the firm declaration that it was one of the best RPGs of all time. But blimey, it really is.

I played all four games this year, as they arrived on PC, and was ever-increasingly amazed at what was achieved. It’s tempting to describe the first as a loyal recreation of Steve Jackson’s original book, but actually that’s not fair. While it’s the most… “faithful”, it still reinvents the concept of a page-turning choose your own adventure into a world map, creates a new and immediately successful dice-free combat system, gets a gambling game into a working state within a text system, and delivers the lines of the story to you in a dynamic and novel (fnarr) way.

…

In the end, rather than being a retro experience harking back to the long-lost days of the choose your own adventure novel, Sorcery! has been pioneering and hugely original. It’s an RPG everyone else in the industry should be playing to see exactly what they should be reaching for, how something with pared down tools and minimalist options for communicating with the player, sets the bar for them to aim for.

Read the article.

More information.

Very high praises, but I generally dislike choose your own adventure novels. Not sure if I should try this one.

I played the first two and liked them, but haven't gotten around to picking up parts 3 and 4. I guess I'll replay the first two since it was years ago, and although the save remains it would feel weird to jump into the middle now.

Good mobile game? Absolutely.
One of the best RPG's of all time? Nope, that's seriously pushing it. What it is though is a game series that takes something usually lackluster (choose-your-adventure) and makes it a hell of alot more interesting. I recommend picking the first one up, should be cheap. Then decide if you want the rest.

Originally Posted by mbpopolano24
I generally dislike choose your own adventure novels.

You're trolling with this comment, right?

How can anyone dislike the greatest invention in books ever?

I really really regret selling my original physical editions.
I bought each as they were first published. One of them was even packaged with a separate spell book. Sigh.

I think they're very decent choose your own adventure visual novels. For me they are very far away from RPG of the year material, though. They are light on mechanics, or anything that resembles gameplay.

Originally Posted by Shagnak
I really really regret selling my original physical editions.
I bought each as they were first published. One of them was even packaged with a separate spell book. Sigh.

Luckily for me, I've kept hold of mine for over 30yrs and several house moves, but I'm yet to get round to playing them. Thinking about it they probably count as the oldest purchase in my ever expanding backlog!

If it makes you feel better, I did throw away a boxed copy of Ultima III: Exodus for the C64, back in the mid nineties. My C64 had long since died and as this was before the days of emulators or ebay, I couldn't see any point in keeping it. It still pains me to recall ripping up the box and spell books before throwing them away.

Choose Your Own Adventure books were amazing back in the day. Growing up with video games and RPGs and those books were as close to video games that you could read at the time (if that makes sense).

I don't think an RPG or game necessarily needs traditional gameplay to be good. I'm sure there are some old folks who would claim that some text RPGs were the best as well.